Former Steelers Join Meadows Team

Former Steelers teammates and four-time Super Bowl Champions Franco Harris and Rocky Bleier have joined to help with philanthropy and advertising efforts.

The hall of fame duo—credited as the second pair of running backs to rush for 1,000 yards in a season—will appear in ads set to air Friday.

“The Meadows (casino) is very community-minded, and this is a step further to make it more so,” Meadows Vice President and General Manager Sean Sullivan said Wednesday.

“We’ve given more than $1 million in charity…most recently working with the local food bank to bring in nearly 410,000 pounds of food,” Sullivan said. “These guys are more than football players…much more than hall-of-famers—Franco and Rocky are synonymous with ‘giving back.’”

Robert “Rocky” Bleier, a Vietnam veteran, said he’s glad to be back as
Franco’s teammate. “Our reasons for joining is the leadership here. It’s a philosophy—it’s the people,” Bleier said.

“We carried the ball together, working in that backfield. We like to be the best, and work with the best,” Franco Harris said.

The two were presented with black-and-red jerseys with their old team
numbers. In a moment of levity, the two auctioned off the jerseys to two people in the crowd for answering a couple of trivia questions on their careers.

“Now that Franco has set the tone with his question—there are six pairs of running backs that got 1,000 yards. Name each of those pairs, the colleges they went to, and where they were born,” Bleier jested to the crowd.

He then asked which year the two received their 1,000 yards recognition, to which a crowd member answered correctly—1976.

Look for the pair when the Meadows hosts Black and Gold events throughout the year.